Blues-guitarist extraordinaire Buddy Guy is credited with creating the flamboyant showman style and blues-rock licks that were copied by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to sell millions of records. But none of the nearly 70 albums Guy has put out has gone gold or platinum, or even hit Billboard’s Top 40.

In a recent telephone call to promote his how Nov. 6 at Allentown Symphony Hall, Guy, 75, talked about how much influence he’s had on guitar players of today, and the hopes he still has for his career.

Clapton once called Guy the greatest guitar player alive, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked him the No. 30 greatest guitar player of all time. He’s won six Grammy Awards, and in 2005 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Guy’s latest disc, “Living Proof,” won the 2010 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album and was in the Top 10 Blues albums for 40 weeks, but still has sold fewer than 100,000 copies.

The disc is autobiographical, with the opening track “74 Years Young” (Guy turned 75 in July) and other songs such as “Thank Me Someday” and the title track. But Guy says the disc’s story was the idea of his drummer, Tom Hambridge, who also produced the disc and wrote all 12 songs. (Guy co-wrote five).

Guy started his career as a valued sideman on albums by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells and dozens of other blues greats, including B.B. King and Santana, who are guests on the new disc.

Here’s a transcript of the call:

LEHIGH VALLEY MUSIC: Hey Buddy, how’s it going?

BUDDY GUY: “Well, I’m trying to hang on. I’ve got this little frog in my throat. You’ll have to overlook that. I got this [clears his throat] little thing that comes in my throat two or three times a year, with this cold weather change and here today and gone tomorrow, hot or cold, and it’s finally caught up with me. I’m not immune . I’m just another guitar player. Everything that comes along, I catch it anyway.”

Well, thanks for taking the time to speak with me, even with your throat ailment. Let me jump right into this. I want to talk a little bit about “Living Proof.” It’s your highest-charting album ever. How satisfying is that, at this point in your career?

“You know, I’ve very satisfied with it, compare to the way things are. My manager showed me the blues chart in Billboard – he faxed it to me, and it was kind of blurred. And I said, you know, this record’s been in the blues charts, up in the Top 10, for 40 weeks, and that record still hasn’t sold 100,000 copies. That’s just the way things are now. People don’t buy records no more. I just was being interviewed and I told the guy that record set of album sales of Michael Jackson, 50-some million copies. I don’t think nobody will ever top that now. Because technology done move in, and people don’t buy the albums or the CDs anymore. They just download one record off there and that’s it. And the way the economy is now, people don’t have the money to buy them like them like that anymore. So if I had had a record on the charts for 40 weeks 30 years ago, I wouldn’t know where to put my money now. [Laughs] Yeah, but it’s a different story now, man.

“But I’m very happy at what it did. At least my record company didn’t drop me so far. I guess if you can keep making a little noise like that, I guess you’ll be around for a while. Because a lot of record companies done closed their doors anyway, man. I heard lately it was, like, maybe three major labels now out there, anyway.”

Yeah. And what you say is absolutely correct. But just the fact that in that atmosphere that you’re still hanging in there speaks volumes of how good you are. And I don’t think your record company will ever drop you.

“I hope not, because I’m the – what’s the old saying? – Last of the Mohicans. From the deaths of Howling Wolf to Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Junior [Wells], all of them. The good lord let me hang around. On the record [I have a song, “Stay Around a Little Longer”] – me and BB [King] sang on it, a spiritual record: ‘’Thank the Lord for letting me hang around a little longer.’ “

Now, I read that the album is autobiographical. Is that correct?

“Uh, yeah, yeah. I would says so.”

And why did you design it that way? Or why did it come out that way?

“You k now, I didn’t have much to do with that. My drummer, Tom Hambridge, he’s the producer and the writer of most of the songs. Him and I wrote some together and he wrote some of them. And he had done a pretty good job on the [last record], called ‘Skin Deep.” ‘Cause Atlantic Records Co. was saying we had to get a producer. I said, ‘Man, you know, when I left the farm and was looking for a job in Baton Rouge, just pumping gas – cause you didn’t pump your own gas then – and I’m like 13 years old and I’m saying, ‘I would like a job at the service station.’ And the guy looked at me and said, ‘You got any experience?’ And I don’t curse, but I wanted to say, ‘How in the f—k can I get experience at 13 years old if you don’t give me a chance to get it?’ And that’s what happened with this producer. He’s down in Nashville, he’s great, man, he’s good, he got an ear, and he just did a George Thorogood and I think BB – he may actually do him.”

The result is great. Let me ask about the guests you have on there. How did you hook up with Santana?

“Oh, me and Santana go way back in the [late concert promoter] Bill Graham days, when Bill had him all tied up there. I would go out to San Francisco to play. Man, that guy is a down-to-earth guy. You know, like Eric Clapton, they don’t say ‘no’ when you ask them to come in and do something like that. I’ve done a favor if they want me to. But we go way back there, man, when I first started going to California in the early or mid-‘60s, he was right there. And the first thing, he came up and said, ‘Man, I’ve been listening to you, and he’d pop on something that I played, if it was Junior, Muddy, Wolf or Walter, and he would pick a couple of licks out of it, like the British guys did. So we’ve been together. Actually, he tried to produce a record on me, and something happened with the record company, an d they didn’t want it. And the CD I put out before ‘Skin Deep’ [2005’s ‘Bring ‘Em In’], there’s a track on there called ‘I Put a Spell on You’ – that’s him playing on that.

“But me and Junior had did one with him. Ah, sh--, that had to be in the ‘60s, called ‘Vera Cruz.’ And we sung on it with him and played the guitar on there with him.”

I did know that. I’ll have to look it up. And having BB on there – what was the occasion? What made you do that?

“Oh man [Laughs]. I wish I could have had him on every one I ever recorded, man. You know, ‘cause that guy’s the baddest at squeezing the strings on a guitar, man. You can call it rock or whatever – give all these different names to music over years. In the late ‘50s or ‘60s, when they called it rock, or acid rock, or whatever you wanted to call it. And I tell every guitar player I know – and I think I know every one of them, regardless of what they’re [playing] – I say, ‘Man, you ought to jut put a couple of ‘B’s’ on your guitar …

“We did about four days [together] two weeks ago in California, and I said, ‘Man, I was picking cotton on a farm in Louisiana and I was saving my money, about a dollar and a half a day, to buy me an acoustic guitar and you came out with ‘Three O’Clock in the Morning,’ and I had to go work three more years before I could buy a guitar, because you sent the price of guitars up. I tell him and Eric Clapton they did that.”

I saw you open for Tom Petty in Philadelphia a little more than a year ago. And I’m wondering – do you find yourself playing differently for different audiences? Or do you just do your thing no matter who’s listening?

“No, I don’t know nothing else. You know, I’ve been to Africa, all over Africa – I looked at my schedule just this morning, got me going to Argentina, Australia, South American and India. And I don’t go there and say, ‘OK, you got to go with Buddy Guy to India, ‘cause I don’t do this at home. ‘ I don’t know nothin’ else to do but what I brought to Philadelphia or wherever I’m going to go now. I don’t go and say, ‘I got to do something different.’ You take me as I am, or otherwise don’t call me. I don’t know nothing else. I got to be Buddy Guy here, I got to be Buddy Guy there.”

The way all of the guitarists, basically in the world, are giving you credit for what they do. How does that make you feel? I mean, are you at a point in your life where you are accepting that you sort of are a pioneer or a trend-setter?

“No, because what they say. I met this little guitar player I just produced a record on – Quinn Sullivan – you can see him on YouTube. Man, that kid is 12 years old. And if you don’t see his face and hear him, you think he’s my age. I mean, I’ve never see nobody play like that before in my life.

“So what they’re saying is great. But when I come out to there to play, they look at me like saying, ‘I read what they say, but let me see it.’ It’s like being a football player – you got to show that to the people and you just can’t say, ‘I’m a hell of a football player, or hell a boxer and don’t never fight. Somebody will say, ‘Wait, let me see.’ That’s what I have to do now. What Eric Clapton or Hendrix said or The Stones or Keith and them said, I gotta go out and prove that I can hit a few notes on the guitar. I didn’t let that go to my head and say, ‘They done saying how good you are, and all you got to do is show up.’ No, that don’t work. I got to go out there and put on a show, because I been playing my guitar that way all of my life. Some people look at me sometime and say, ‘You know, you just too flashy to go out there in front of B.B. King or George Thorogood or whoever you’re on the show with. I say, ‘Then, man, don’t call me if you don’t want me to be Buddy Guy. I not doing nothing that I haven’t done before. I’ve been playing like this” since the start.”

All of the recognition you’ve been getting – you got a Grammy for your last album, you’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you got the Billboard Century Award. You’ve gotten all these accolades. What keeps you still going?

“Well, hopefully, I would have a record where they would play it and more people would know me than know me now. Because usually I still got people walk up saying, ‘Who in the hell is that?’ And people will say, ‘That’s Buddy Guy.” Matter of fact, I was flying from South America and the pilot knew who I was, and I was in first class and after he come back and asked for my autograph, everybody in first class as asking who in the hell I am. So it says a lot of things.

“You know, I don’t stand out like an Eric Clapton or a Jeff Beck or some of those guitar players who have made and sold millions of records. There’s still a lot of people don’t know who I am. So if I can hang around a little but longer, like the record says, I think that every time I go out and play, I think somebody there has never heard of me and never seen me.So that’s the only thing I could go after. Which is very hard, because you can count the radio stations now that play my type of music on the air. I don’t know why.

“Even before, [Chess Record founders] the Chess Brothers – one of them died – I think the British guys was playing one of the British guys’ songs [originally done] by Howlin’ Wolf. And one of the Chess Brothers went to this station and took the original version by Wolf and the guy put it in the garbage can and stomped it. He said, ‘I can’t play that. But he could play the British version of it.”

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JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.